anthologizing war after the lesser-known Valentine Ackland, and concluding with the Japanese poet
EiYamaguchi following the Australian Judith Wright. In the end this seemed the
least tendentious way of representing the astonishing range of poetic responses to
the War across places, languages, and poets, and ensuring that individual poets
were recognized. Mixing American and British, civilians and combatants, foreign
and English-language poets, I was keen to represent the modernists T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and H. D., all of whom wrote major sequences about the War, and demon-
strate that the Second World War produced a compelling body of poetry in English
and other languages, on a far greater scale and range than the First. My brief was to
include powerful, distinctive, and various poems that respond, directly or indirectly,
to the challenge both of Second World War and their chosen medium. Like the
recalcitrant war poems of Douglas and Henderson, the eclogues of Miklos Radnoti,
Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Wind of War’, Brecht’s Svenborg poems, and Paul Celan’s
Deathfugueare major modern war lyrics, and an indispensable part of the literary
witness to what Joanna Bourke calls ‘the greatest cataclysm in modern history’.^81
I have scarcely touched on general anthologies of war poetry. The first anthologies
to represent war verse across history were in fact thrown up by the First World War,
as I have shown, while others were generated during the Second, including those of
Symons (1940), Williams (1945), and Eberhart and Rodman (1945).^82 Two recent
examples are Jon Stallworthy’sOxford Book of War Poetry(1984) and Kenneth
Baker’sThe Faber Book of War Poetry(1996), one taking a chronological, author-
based approach, and the other a thematic one.^83 Stallworthy gives only 150 or so of
his nearly 340 pages to poetry writtenbefore the First World War, confirmingRobert
Graves’s argument. His own view, as the editor and biographer of Owen, is that
most ‘war poetry has been implicitly, if not explicitly, anti-war’.^84 The anthology
largely confirms this, but by excluding drama and epic, it cuts out Shakespeare,
Spenser, and Milton, the major English poets to write about war, giving a strange
tilt to the historical record. Nevertheless, running from Homer and the Bible to
Heaney and Fenton, it offers a thoughtful chronological sample of poetry of war in
English, interspersed with scattered translations from other languages. It does not
necessarily convince us there is a singular entity called ‘war poetry’. Kenneth Baker’s
miscellaneousFaber Book of War Poetry, by contrast, ignores history, arranging
the material under headings such as ‘Killing’, ‘Nursing and Medicine’, and ‘Old
Battlefields Revisited’. While impressively eclectic, Mrs Thatcher’s Minister for
Education is interested in ‘The PatrioticImperative’ and ‘the Britishness of the
(^81) Joanna Bourke,The Second World War: A People’s History(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 2. 82
Symons (ed.),Anthology of War Poetry; Williams (ed.),War Poets; Richard Eberhart and Selden
Rodman (eds.),War and the Poet.
(^83) Jon Stallworthy (ed.),The Oxford Book of War Poetry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);
Kenneth Baker (ed.), 84 The Faber Book of War Poetry(London: Faber, 1996).
Jon Stallworthy, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Oxford Book of War Poetry,p.xix.